Mon Oncle

Monsieur Hulot lives contentedly in an old, lively quarter of the city, in a modest top-floor flat he has no wish to leave. His sister, married to Charles Arpel, has settled into a sleek new house in the suburbs, where everything runs by machine and nothing is left untidy. Arpel manages a plastics factory, and he and his wife view Hulot's disorderly habits as a poor influence on their young son Gérard. Their efforts to draw Hulot into their world take two forms: they try to interest him in a job at the factory, and they scheme to match him with a neighbour. Hulot visits mainly for the boy's sake, and the two escape together into the streets and playgrounds, where Gérard finds the freedom his own home denies him. The more the family pushes, the more firmly Hulot resists.

Jacques Tati directed and stars as Hulot, the character he had introduced in Monsieur Hulot's Holiday five years earlier; this is the third of the six features he directed, arriving between that film and PlayTime. He wrote the screenplay with Jacques Lagrange and Jean L'Hôte and produced with Fred Orain. Jean-Pierre Zola and Adrienne Servantie play the Arpels, with Jean-François Martial as Walter among a credited cast of twenty-one.

The film drew strong notices from critics, whose rating of 8.6/10 from thirty-three reviews sits well above its audience scores: on IMDb it holds 7.6/10 from around 26,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.4/10 from roughly 633.